Two different politicians announced their retirements today due to health reasons, causing two by-elections that are worth watching.
Kat McNamara won the Northern Territory seat of Nightcliff at the 2024 election, and was the first Greens MP elected in the Territory. McNamara came from third place to win on independent preferences.
One of the most common arguments regarding Australian electoral systems concerns whether voters are required to number every box on their ballot paper in single-member elections. There are principled arguments for two different methods, but often these arguments are backed up by the perceived self-interest of someone’s preferred political party.
The current LNP state government in Queensland was elected on a promise of restoring the Optional Preferential Voting (OPV) system used in the state up until the 2015 election.
Under this system, voters are not required to number every box on the ballot. In contrast, the current Compulsory Preferential Voting (CPV) system requires voters to effectively number every box.
A by-election will be held soon in the Victorian state seat of Nepean, covering the Mornington Peninsula to the south-east of Melbourne.
Nepean has been held since 2022 by Sam Groth. Groth had announced plans to retire at the general election late last year, and stepped down from the deputy leadership last week.
Ben was joined by Donna Weeks, emeritus professor at Musashino University, to discuss this coming weekend’s Japanese general election, where new prime minister Sanae Takaichi will be attempting to achieve her own mandate.
South Australia will go to the polls in March for their state election.
The most recent polls predict an enormous landslide victory for the incumbent Labor government.
Ben was joined by George Hasanakos from pollster DemosAU to discuss the surge in support for One Nation, which has pushed them ahead of the combined Liberal-National vote in a number of polls, as well as the split in the Liberal-National coalition. They discuss how these two trends impact on how polls are conducted.
This podcast was recorded before the publication of polls by YouGov and Essential that continued the continuing trend.
The recent divisions between the Liberal Party and the Nationals, which seem to have culminated in the Nationals ending the coalition this morning, have made me think of the long history of the smaller conservative coalition partner exercising it’s influence over the larger party’s leadership.
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For the final blog post of 2025, I wanted to look at a question that has come up regularly in the comments, and on psephological websites: how meaningful is the two-party-preferred vote, particularly in “teal” seats where Labor isn’t locally competitive, yet is either winning or coming close to winning the two-party-preferred vote.